“I take a sketch-book to a restaurant, or other public place, and draw the people in their different positions as cats, getting as near to their human characteristics as possible. This gives me doubly nature, and these studies I think [are] my best humorous work.”

British artist Louis Wain created an entire world of anthropomorphic cats. They were capable of doing everything that we do and were masterful creators of chaos. Wain was a talented and diverse artist, creating both realistic paintings and whimsical cartoon sketches. In his later years, he also painted psychedelic portraits of cats; a style of art that some attributed to his mental illness.

The editors of the London Illustrated News published his first anthropomorphic drawings of cats in their 1886 Christmas issue. And this was just the beginning of Wain’s venture into anthropomorphic art.

A hundred books were to follow, and his images also graced the front of many holiday postcards.